Someone in Texas shot a fiber line.

The shooter remains a mystery, but nearly 25,000 people were taken offline by the incident. The outage affected parts of Dallas, Irving, Plano, Arlington, Austin, and San Antonio. […] As random as a bullet taking down the internet might sound, there’s actually precedent to this sort of thing. Three years ago, 30,000 Comcast customers in Oakland, Calif. found themselves unable to go online after people reportedly fired 17 rounds in the air near fiber lines.

I’m reminded more of the 2022 Vermont case that was “not an accident“.

Quick back-of-napkin list:

• 2008 January, Memphis, Tennessee: Comcast fiber damaged by celebratory gunfire
• 2011 Vineland, New Jersey: Verizon FiOS box damaged
• 2011, Bend, Oregon: Bend Broadband fiber hit by gunfire
• 2021 February, Holyrood, Newfoundland, Canada: Two locations damaged by gunshots
• 2021 March, Bay Bulls, Newfoundland, Canada: Two complaints of gunshot damage
• 2022 Oakland, California: 17 rounds fired at Comcast Xfinity, 30,000 customers offline
• 2022 December, Cambridge, Vermont: Stowe Cable fiber, 13-hour outage
• 2024 June, Ohio: Shotgun blast on Spectrum line, week-long outage
• 2025 January, Columbus, Ohio: Spectrum fiber, 43-hour outage
• 2025 September, Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas: 25,000 Spectrum customers offline